Specify a different color set in the command line. The format of arg is
documented in the
Colors
section.

--configure-options

Display configure options.

-d, --nomouse

Disable mouse support.

-D N, --debuglevel=N

Save the debug level for SMB VFS. N is in 0-10 range.

-e [file], --edit[=file]

Start the internal editor. If the file is specified, open it on
startup. See also
mcedit (1).

-f, --datadir

Display the compiled-in search paths for Midnight Commander files.

-F, --datadir-info

Display extended info about compiled-in paths for
Midnight Commander.

-g, --oldmouse

Force a "normal tracking" mouse mode. Used when running on
xterm-capable terminals (tmux/screen).

-k, --resetsoft

Reset softkeys to their default from the termcap/terminfo
database. Only useful on HP terminals when the function keys don't work.

-K file, --keymap=file

Specify a name of keymap file in the command line.

-l file, --ftplog=file

Save the ftpfs dialog with the server in file.

--nokeymap

Don't load key bindings from any file, use default hardcoded keys.

-P file, --printwd=file

Print the last working directory to the specified file. This option is
not meant to be used directly. Instead, it's used from a special shell
script that automatically changes the current directory of the shell to
the last directory the Midnight Commander was in. Source the file
/usr/libexec/mc/mc.sh
(bash and zsh users) or
/usr/libexec/mc.csh
(tcsh users) respectively to define
mc
as an alias to the appropriate shell script.

-s, --slow

Set alternative mode drawing of frameworks.
If the section [Lines] is not filled, the symbol for the pseudographics
frame is a space, otherwise the frame characters are taken from follow params.

You can redefine the following variables:

lefttop

left-top corner

righttop

right-top corner

centertop

center-top cross

centerbottom

center-bottom cross

leftbottom

left-bottom corner

rightbottom

right-bottom corner

leftmiddle

left-middle cross

rightmiddle

right-middle cross

centermiddle

center cross

horiz

default horizontal line

vert

default vertical line

thinhoriz

thin horizontal line

thinvert

thin vertical line

-S arg, --skin=arg

Specify a name of skin in the command line. Technology of skins is
documented in the
Skins
section.

-t, --termcap

Used only if the code was compiled with Slang and terminfo: it makes
the Midnight Commander use the value of the
TERMCAP
variable for the terminal information instead of the information on
the system wide terminal database

-u, --nosubshell

Disable use of the concurrent shell (only makes sense if the Midnight
Commander has been built with concurrent shell support).

-U, --subshell

Enable use of the concurrent shell support (only makes sense if the
Midnight Commander was built with the subshell support set as an
optional feature).

-v file, --view=file

Start the internal viewer to view the specified file. See also
mcview (1).

-V, --version

Display the version of the program.

-x, --xterm

Force xterm mode. Used when running on xterm-capable terminals (two
screen modes, and able to send mouse escape sequences).

-X, --no-x11

Do not use X11 to get the state of modifiers Alt, Ctrl, Shift

If both paths are specified, the first path name is the directory to show
in the active panel; the second path name is the directory to be shown in
the other panel.

If one path is specified, the path name is the directory to show
in the active panel; value of "other_dir" from panels.ini is the directory
to be shown in the passive panel.

If no paths are specified, current directory is shown in the active panel;
value of "other_dir" from panels.ini is the directory to be shown in
the passive panel.

Overview

The screen of the Midnight Commander is divided into four parts.
Almost all of the screen space is taken up by two directory panels.
By default, the second line from the bottom of the screen is the
shell command line, and the bottom line shows the function key labels.
The topmost line is the
menu bar line.
The menu bar line may not be visible, but appears if you click the
topmost line with the mouse or press the F9 key.

The Midnight Commander provides a view of two directories at the same
time. One of the panels is the current panel (a selection bar is in
the current panel). Almost all operations take place on the current
panel. Some file operations like Rename and Copy by default use the
directory of the unselected panel as a destination (don't worry, they
always ask you for confirmation first). For more information, see the
sections on the
Directory Panels,
the
Left and Right Menus
and the
File Menu.

You can execute system commands from the Midnight Commander by simply
typing them. Everything you type will appear on the shell command line,
and when you press Enter the Midnight Commander will execute the
command line you typed; read the
Shell Command Line
and
Input Line Keys
sections to learn more about the command line.

Mouse Support

The Midnight Commander comes with mouse support. It is activated
whenever you are running on an
xterm(1)
terminal (it even works if you take a telnet, ssh or rlogin connection to
another machine from the xterm) or if you are running on a Linux
console and have the
gpm
mouse server running.

When you left click on a file in the directory panels, that file is
selected; if you click with the right button, the file is marked (or
unmarked, depending on the previous state).

Double-clicking on a file will try to execute the command if it is
an executable program; and if the
extension file
has a program specified for the file's extension, the specified
program is executed.

Also, it is possible to execute the commands assigned to the function
key labels by clicking on them.

The default auto repeat rate for the mouse buttons is 400
milliseconds. This may be changed to other values by editing the
~/.config/mc/ini
file and changing the
mouse_repeat_rate
parameter.

If you are running the Midnight Commander with the mouse support, you
can get the default mouse behavior (cutting and pasting text) by holding
down the Shift key.

Keys

Some commands in the Midnight Commander involve the use of the
Control
(sometimes labeled CTRL or CTL) and the
Meta
(sometimes labeled ALT or even Compose) keys. In this manual we will
use the following abbreviations:

C-<chr>

means hold the Control key while typing the character <chr>.
Thus C-f would be: hold the Control key and type f.

Alt-<chr>

means hold the Meta or Alt key down while typing <chr>.
If there is no Meta or Alt key, type
ESC,
release it, then type the character <chr>.

S-<chr>

means hold the Shift key down while typing <chr>.

All input lines in the Midnight Commander use an approximation to
the GNU Emacs editor's key bindings (default).

You may redefine key bindings. See
redefine hotkey bindings

for more info. All other key bindings (described in this manual) relative
to default behavior.

There are many sections which tell about the keys. The following are
the most important.

The
File Menu
section documents the keyboard shortcuts for the commands appearing in
the File menu. This section includes the function keys. Most of these
commands perform some action, usually on the selected file or the
tagged files.

The
Directory Panels
section documents the keys which select a file or tag files as a
target for a later action (the action is usually one from the file
menu).

The
Shell Command Line
section list the keys which are used for entering and editing command
lines. Most of these copy file names and such from the directory
panels to the command line (to avoid excessive typing) or access the
command line history.

Input Line Keys
are used for editing input lines. This means both the command line and
the input lines in the query dialogs.

Redefine hotkey bindings

Hotkey bindings may be read from external file (keymap-file).
Initially, Mignight Commander creates key bindings using keymap defined
in the source code. Then, two files
/usr/share/mc/mc.keymap
and
/etc/mc/mc.keymap
are loaded always, sequentially reassigned key bindings defined earlier.
User-defined keymap-file is searched on the following algorithm (to the first one found):

Command line option, environment variable and parameter in config file may
contain the absolute path to the keymap-file (with the extension .keymap
or without it). Search of keymap-file will occur in (to the first one found):

1)
~/.config/mc
2)
/etc/mc/
3)
/usr/share/mc/

Miscellaneous Keys

Here are some keys which don't fall into any of the other categories:

Enter

if there is some text in the command line (the one at the bottom of
the panels), then that command is executed. If there is no text in the
command line then if the selection bar is over a directory the
Midnight Commander does a
chdir(2)
to the selected directory and reloads the information on the panel;
if the selection is an executable file then it is executed. Finally,
if the extension of the selected file name matches one of the
extensions in the
extensions file
then the corresponding command is executed.

C-l

repaint all the information in the Midnight Commander.

C-x c

run the
Chmod
command on a file or on the tagged files.

C-x o

run the
Chown
command on the current file or on the tagged files.

C-x l

run the hard link command.

C-x s

run the absolute symbolic link command.

C-x v

run the relative symbolic link command. See the
File Menu
section for more information about symbolic links.

C-x i

set the other panel display mode to information.

C-x q

set the other panel display mode to quick view.

C-x !

execute the
External panelize
command.

C-x h

run the
add directory to hotlist
command.

Alt-!

executes the Filtered view command, described in the
view command.

Alt-?

executes the
Find file
command.

Alt-c

pops up the
quick cd
dialog.

C-o

when the program is being run in the Linux or FreeBSD console or under
an xterm, it will show you the output of the previous command. When ran
on the Linux console, the Midnight Commander uses an external program
(cons.saver) to handle saving and restoring of information on the
screen.

When the subshell support is compiled in, you can type C-o at any time
and you will be taken back to the Midnight Commander main screen, to
return to your application just type C-o. If you have an application
suspended by using this trick, you won't be able to execute other
programs from the Midnight Commander until you terminate the suspended
application.

Directory Panels

This section lists the keys which operate on the directory panels. If
you want to know how to change the appearance of the panels take a
look at the section on
Left and Right Menus.

Tab, C-i

change the current panel. The old other panel becomes the new current
panel and the old current panel becomes the new other panel. The
selection bar moves from the old current panel to the new current
panel.

Insert, C-t

to tag files you may use the Insert key (the kich1 terminfo sequence).
To untag files, just retag a tagged file.

M-e

to change charset of panel you may use M-e (Alt-e).
Recoding is made from selected codepage into system codepage. To
cancel the recoding you may select "directory up" (..) in active panel.
To cancel the charsets in all directories, select "No translation " in
the dialog of encodings.

Alt-g, Alt-r, Alt-j

used to select the top file in a panel, the middle file and the bottom one,
respectively.

Alt-t

toggle the current display listing to show the next display listing
mode.
With this it is possible to quickly switch to brief listing, long
listing, user defined listing mode, and back to the default.

C-\\ (control-backslash)

show the
directory hotlist
and change to the selected directory.

+ (plus)

this is used to select (tag) a group of files. The Midnight Commander
will prompt for a selection options. When
Files only
checkbox is on, only files will be selected. If
Files only
is off, as files as directories will be selected.
When
Shell Patterns
checkbox is on, the regular expression is much like the filename globbing
in the shell (* standing for zero or more characters and ? standing
for one character). If
Shell Patterns
is off, then the tagging of files is done with normal regular
expressions (see ed (1)). When
Case sensitive
checkbox is on, the selection will be case sensitive characters.
If
Case sensitive
is off, the case will be ignored.

\\ (backslash)

use the "\" key to unselect a group of files. This is the opposite of
the Plus key.

up-key, C-p

move the selection bar to the previous entry in the panel.

down-key, C-n

move the selection bar to the next entry in the panel.

home, a1, Alt-<

move the selection bar to the first entry in the panel.

end, c1, Alt->

move the selection bar to the last entry in the panel.

next-page, C-v

move the selection bar one page down.

prev-page, Alt-v

move the selection bar one page up.

Alt-o

If the currently selected file is a directory, load that directory on
the other panel and moves the selection to the next file. If the
currently selected file is not a directory, load the parent directory
on the other panel and moves the selection to the next file.

Alt-i

make the current directory of the current panel also the current
directory of the other panel. Put the other panel to the listing mode
if needed. If the current panel is panelized, the other panel doesn't
become panelized.

C-PageUp, C-PageDown

only when supported by the terminal: change to ".." and to the currently
selected directory respectively.

Alt-y

moves to the previous directory in the history, equivalent to clicking
the
<
with the mouse.

Alt-u

moves to the next directory in the history, equivalent to clicking the
>
with the mouse.

Alt-Shift-h, Alt-H

displays the directory history, equivalent to depressing the 'v' with
the mouse.

Quick search

The Quick search mode allows you to perform fast file search in file panel.
Press
C-s
or
Alt-s
to start a filename search in the directory listing.
When the search is active, the user input will be added to the search string
instead of the command line. If the
Show mini-status
option is enabled the search string is shown on the mini-status
line. When typing, the selection bar will move to the next file
starting with the typed letters. The
Backspace
or
DEL
keys can be used to correct typing mistakes. If C-s is pressed
again, the next match is searched for.
If quick search is started with double pressing of C-s, the previous quick
search pattern will be used for current search.
Besides the filename characters, you can also use wildcard
characters '*' and '?'.

Shell Command Line

This section lists keys which are useful to avoid excessive typing when
entering shell commands.

Alt-Enter

copy the currently selected file name to the command line.

C-Enter

same a Alt-Enter. May not work on remote systems and some terminals.

C-Shift-Enter

copy the full path name of the currently selected file to the command
line. May not work on remote systems and some terminals.

Alt-Tab

does the filename, command, variable, username and hostname
completion
for you.

C-x t, C-x C-t

copy the tagged files (or if there are no tagged files, the selected
file) of the current panel (C-x t) or of the other panel (C-x C-t) to
the command line.

C-x p, C-x C-p

the first key sequence copies the current path name to the command
line, and the second one copies the unselected panel's path name to
the command line.

C-q

the quote command can be used to insert characters that are otherwise
interpreted by the Midnight Commander (like the '+' symbol)

Alt-p, Alt-n

use these keys to browse through the command history. Alt-p takes you
to the last entry, Alt-n takes you to the next one.

Alt-h

displays the history for the current input line.

General Movement Keys

The help viewer, the file viewer and the directory tree use common
code to handle moving. Therefore they accept exactly the same
keys. Each of them also accepts some keys of its own.

Other parts of the Midnight Commander use some of the same movement
keys, so this section may be of use for those parts too.

Up, C-p

moves one line backward.

Down, C-n

moves one line forward.

Prev Page, Page Up, Alt-v

moves one page up.

Next Page, Page Down, C-v

moves one page down.

Home, A1

moves to the beginning.

End, C1

move to the end.

The help viewer and the file viewer accept the following keys in
addition the to ones mentioned above:

b, C-b, C-h, Backspace, Delete

moves one page up.

Space bar

moves one page down.

u, d

moves one half of a page up or down.

g, G

moves to the beginning or to the end.

Input Line Keys

The input lines (they are used for the
command line
and for the query dialogs in the program) accept these keys:

C-a

puts the cursor at the beginning of line.

C-e

puts the cursor at the end of the line.

C-b, move-left

move the cursor one position left.

C-f, move-right

move the cursor one position right.

Alt-f

moves one word forward.

Alt-b

moves one word backward.

C-h, Backspace

delete the previous character.

C-d, Delete

delete the character in the point (over the cursor).

C-@

sets the mark for cutting.

C-w

copies the text between the cursor and the mark to a kill buffer and
removes the text from the input line.

Alt-w

copies the text between the cursor and the mark to a kill buffer.

C-y

yanks back the contents of the kill buffer.

C-k

kills the text from the cursor to the end of the line.

Alt-p, Alt-n

Use these keys to browse through the command history. Alt-p takes you
to the last entry, Alt-n takes you to the next one.

Alt-C-h, Alt-Backspace

delete one word backward.

Alt-Tab

does the filename, command, variable, username and hostname
completion
for you.

Menu Bar

The menu bar pops up when you press F9 or click the mouse on the top
row of the screen. The menu bar has five menus: "Left", "File",
"Command", "Options" and "Right".

The
Left and Right Menus
allow you to modify the appearance of the left and right directory
panels.

The
File Menu
lists the actions you can perform on the currently selected file or
the tagged files.

The
Command Menu
lists the actions which are more general and bear no relation to the
currently selected file or the tagged files.

The
Options Menu
lists the actions which allow you to customize the Midnight Commander.

Left and Right (Above and Below) Menus

The outlook of the directory panels can be changed from the
Left
and
Right
menus (they are named
Above
and
Below
when the horizontal panel split is chosen from the
Layout
options dialog).

Listing Mode...

The listing mode view is used to display a listing of files, there are
four different listing modes available:
Full,
Brief,
Long
and
User.
The full directory view shows the file name, the size of the file and
the modification time.

The brief view shows only the file name and it has two columns
(therefore showing twice as many files as other views). The long view
is similar to the output of
ls -l
command. The long view takes the whole screen width.

If you choose the "User" display format, then you have to specify
the display format.

The user display format must start with a panel size specifier. This
may be "half" or "full", and they specify a half screen panel and a
full screen panel respectively.

After the panel size, you may specify the two columns mode on the
panel, this is done by adding the number "2" to the user format
string.

After this you add the name of the fields with an optional size
specifier. This are the available fields you may display:

name

displays the file name.

size

displays the file size.

bsize

is an alternative form of the
size
format. It displays the size of the files and for directories it just
shows SUB-DIR or UP--DIR.

type

displays a one character wide type field. This character is similar to
what is displayed by ls with the -F flag -
*
for executable files,
/
for directories,
@
for links,
=
for sockets,
-
for character devices,
+
for block devices,
|
for pipes,
~
for symbolic links to directories and
!
for stale symlinks (links that point nowhere).

mark

an asterisk if the file is tagged, a space if it's not.

mtime

file's last modification time.

atime

file's last access time.

ctime

file's status change time.

perm

a string representing the current permission bits of the file.

mode

an octal value with the current permission bits of the file.

nlink

the number of links to the file.

ngid

the GID (numeric).

nuid

the UID (numeric).

owner

the owner of the file.

group

the group of the file.

inode

the inode of the file.

Also you can use following keywords to define the panel layout:

space

a space in the display format.

|

add a vertical line to the display format.

To force one field to a fixed size (a size specifier), you just add
:
followed by the number of characters you want the field to have. If the
number is followed by the symbol
+,
then the size specifies the minimal field size - if the program finds
out that there is more space on the screen, it will then expand that
field.

The info view display information related to the currently
selected file and if possible information about the current file
system.

Tree

The tree view is quite similar to the
directory tree
feature. See the section about it for more information.

Quick View

In this mode, the panel will switch to a reduced
viewer
that displays the contents of the currently selected file, if you
select the panel (with the tab key or the mouse), you will have access
to the usual viewer commands.

Sort Order...

The eight sort orders are by name, by extension, by modification time,
by access time, and by inode information modification time, by size,
by inode and unsorted. In the Sort order dialog box you can choose
the sort order and you may also specify if you want to sort in reverse
order by checking the reverse box.

By default directories are sorted before files but this can be changed
from the
Panel options
menu (option
Mix all files).

Filter...

The filter command allows you to specify a shell pattern (for example
*.tar.gz)
which the files must match to be shown. Regardless
of the filter pattern, the directories and the links to directories
are always shown in the directory panel.

Reread

The reread command reload the list of files in the directory. It is
useful if other processes have created or removed files.

File Menu

The Midnight Commander uses the F1 - F10 keys as keyboard shortcuts
for commands appearing in the file menu. The escape sequences for the
function keys are terminfo capabilities kf1 trough kf10. On terminals
without function key support, you can achieve the same functionality by
pressing the ESC key and then a number in the range 1 through 9 and 0
(corresponding to F1 to F9 and F10 respectively).

The File menu has the following commands (keyboard shortcuts in parentheses):

Help (F1)

Invokes the built-in hypertext help viewer. Inside the
help viewer,
you can use the Tab key to select the next link and the Enter key to
follow that link. The keys Space and Backspace are used to move
forward and backward in a help page. Press F1 again to get the full
list of accepted keys.

Menu (F2)

Invoke the
user menu.
The user menu provides an easy way to provide users with a menu and
add extra features to the Midnight Commander.

View (F3, F13)

View the currently selected file. By default this invokes the
Internal File Viewer
but if the option "Use internal view" is off, it invokes an external
file viewer specified by the
VIEWER
environment variable. If
VIEWER
is undefined, the
PAGER
environment variable is tried. If
PAGER
is also undefined, the "view" command is invoked. If you use F13
instead, the viewer will be invoked without doing any formatting or
preprocessing to the file.
See
parameters for external viewer
for explain how you may specify an extended command line options
for external viewers.

Filtered View (Alt-!)

This command prompts for a command
and its arguments (the argument defaults to the currently selected
file name), the output from such command is shown in the internal file
viewer.

Edit (F4, F14)

Press F4 to edit the highlighted file. Press F14 (usually F14)
to start the editor with a new, empty file.
Currently they invoke the
vi
editor, or the editor specified in the
EDITOR
environment variable, or the
Internal File Editor
if the use_internal_edit option is on.
See
parameters for external editor
for explain how you may specify an extended command line options
for external editors.

Copy (F5, F15)

Press F5 to pop up an input dialog to copy the currently selected file (or
the tagged files, if there is at least one file tagged) to the
directory/filename you specify in the input dialog. The destination
defaults to the directory in the non-selected panel. Space for destination
file may be preallocated relative to preallocate_space configure option.
During this process, you can press C-c or ESC to abort the operation.
For details about source mask (which will be usually either * or ^\(.*\)$
depending on setting of Use shell patterns) and possible wildcards in the
destination see
Mask copy/rename.

F15 (usually F15) is similar, but defaults to the directory in the
selected panel. It always operates on the selected file, regardless of
any tagged files.

On some systems, it is possible to do the copy in the background by
clicking on the background button (or pressing Alt-b in the dialog
box). The
Background Jobs
is used to control the background process.

Link (C-x l)

Create a hard link to the current file.

Absolute symlink (C-x s)

Create a absolute symbolic link to the current file.

Relative symLink (C-x v)

Create a relative symbolic link to the current file.

To those of you who don't know what links are: creating a link to a file
is a bit like copying the file, but both the source filename and the destination
filename represent the same file image. For example, if you edit one of these
files, all changes you make will appear in both files. Some people call
links aliases or shortcuts.

A hard link appears as a real file. After making it, there is no way of
telling which one is the original and which is the link. If you delete
either one of them the other one is still intact. It is very difficult
to notice that the files represent the same image. Use hard links when
you don't even want to know.

A symbolic link is a reference to the name of the original file. If
the original file is deleted the symbolic link is useless. It is quite
easy to notice that the files represent the same image. The Midnight
Commander shows an "@"-sign in front of the file name if it is a
symbolic link to somewhere (except to directory, where it shows a tilde (~)).
The original file which the link points to is shown on mini-status line if the
Show mini-status
option is enabled. Use symbolic links when you want to avoid the
confusion that can be caused by hard links.

When you press "C-x s" Midnight Commander will automatically fill in the
complete path+filename of the original file and suggest a name for the link.
You can change either one.

Sometimes you may want to change the absolute path of the original into
a relative path. An absolute path starts from the root directory:

/home/frodo/mc/mc -> /home/frodo/new/mc

A relative link describes the original file's location starting from the
location of the link itself:

/home/frodo/mc/mc -> ../new/mc

You can force Midnight Commander to suggest a relative path by pressing
"C-x v" instead of "C-x s".

Rename/Move (F6, F16)

Press F6 to pop up an input dialog to copy the currently selected file (or
the tagged files, if there is at least one file tagged) to the
directory/filename you specify in the input dialog. The destination
defaults to the directory in the non-selected panel. For more details
look at Copy (F5) operation above, most of the things are quite similar.

F16 (usually F16) is similar, but defaults to the directory in the
selected panel. It always operates on the selected file, regardless of
any tagged files.

On some systems, it is possible to do the copy in the background by
clicking on the background button (or pressing Alt-b in the dialog
box). The
Background Jobs
is used to control the background process.

Mkdir (F7)

Pop up an input dialog and creates the directory specified.

Delete (F8)

Delete the currently selected file or the tagged files in the
currently selected panel. During the process, you can press C-c or
ESC to abort the operation.

Quick cd (Alt-c)
Use the
quick cd
command if you have full command line and want to cd somewhere.

Select group (+)

This is used to select (tag) a group of files. The Midnight Commander
will prompt for a selection options. When
Files only
checkbox is on, only files will be selected. If
Files only
is off, as files as directories will be selected.
When
Shell Patterns
checkbox is on, the regular expression is much like the filename globbing
in the shell (* standing for zero or more characters and ? standing
for one character). If
Shell Patterns
is off, then the tagging of files is done with normal regular
expressions (see ed (1)). When
Case sensitive
checkbox is on, the selection will be case sensitive characters.
If
Case sensitive
is off, the case will be ignored.

Unselect group (\\)

Used to unselect a group of files. This is the opposite of the
Select group
command.

Quit (F10, Shift-F10)

Terminate the Midnight Commander. Shift-F10 is used when you want to
quit and you are using the shell wrapper. Shift-F10 will not take you
to the last directory you visited with the Midnight Commander, instead
it will stay at the directory where you started the Midnight Commander.

Quick cd

This command is useful if you have a full command line and want to
cd
somewhere without having to yank and paste the command line. This command
pops up a small dialog, where you enter everything you would enter after
cd
on the command line and then you press enter. This features all the things
that are already in the
internal cd command.

Command Menu

The
Directory tree
command shows a tree figure of the directories.

The
"Find file"
command allows you to search for a specific file.

The "Swap panels" command swaps the contents of the two directory panels.

The "Switch panels on/off" command shows the output of the last shell command.
This works only on xterm and on Linux and FreeBSD console.

The "Compare directories" command compares the directory
panels with each other. You can then use the Copy (F5) command to make
the panels identical. There are three compare methods. The quick method
compares only file size and file date. The thorough method makes a
full byte-by-byte compare. The thorough method is not available if the
machine does not support the mmap(2) system call. The size-only
compare method just compares the file sizes and does not check the
contents or the date times, it just checks the file size.

The
"External panelize"
allows you to execute an external program, and make the output of that
program the contents of the current panel.

The "Command history" command shows a list of typed commands. The
selected command is copied to the command line. The command history
can also be accessed by typing Alt-p or Alt-n.

The
"Directory hotlist"
command makes changing of the current directory to often used directories
faster.

The
"Screen list"
command shows a dialog window with the list of currently running
internal editors, viewers and other MC modules that support this mode.

The
"Edit extension file"
command allows you to specify programs to executed when you try to
execute, view, edit and do a bunch of other thing on files
with certain extensions (filename endings).

The
"Edit Menu File"
command may be used for editing the user menu (which appears by
pressing F2).

Directory Tree

The Directory Tree command shows a tree figure of the directories. You
can select a directory from the figure and the Midnight Commander will
change to that directory.

There are two ways to invoke the tree. The real directory tree command
is available from Commands menu. The other way is to select tree view
from the Left or Right menu.

To get rid of long delays the Midnight Commander creates the tree
figure by scanning only a small subset of all the directories. If the
directory which you want to see is missing, move to its parent
directory and press C-r (or F2).

You can use the following keys:

General movement keys
are accepted.

Enter.
In the directory tree, exits the directory tree and changes to this
directory in the current panel. In the tree view, changes to this
directory in the other panel and stays in tree view mode in the
current panel.

C-r, F2 (Rescan).
Rescan this directory. Use this when the tree figure is out of date:
it is missing subdirectories or shows some subdirectories which don't
exist any more.

F3 (Forget).
Delete this directory from the tree figure. Use this to remove clutter
from the figure. If you want the directory back to the tree figure
press F2 in its parent directory.

In the static navigation mode you can use the Up and Down keys to
select a directory. All known directories are shown.

In the dynamic navigation mode you can use the Up and Down keys to
select a sibling directory, the Left key to move to the parent
directory, and the Right key to move to a child directory. Only the
parent, sibling and children directories are shown, others are left
out. The tree figure changes dynamically as you traverse.

F5 (Copy).
Copy the directory.

F6 (RenMov).
Move the directory.

F7 (Mkdir).
Make a new directory below this directory.

F8 (Delete).
Delete this directory from the file system.

C-s, Alt-s.
Search the next directory matching the search string. If there is
no such directory these keys will move one line down.

C-h, Backspace.
Delete the last character of the search string.

Any other character.
Add the character to the search string and move to the next directory
which starts with these characters. In the tree view you must first
activate the search mode by pressing C-s. The search string is shown
in the mini status line.

The following actions are available only in the directory tree. They
aren't supported in the tree view.

F1 (Help).
Invoke the help viewer and show this section.

Esc, F10.
Exit the directory tree. Do not change the directory.

The mouse is supported. A double-click behaves like Enter. See
also the section on
mouse support.

Find File

The Find File feature first asks for the start directory for the
search and the filename to be searched for. By pressing the Tree
button you can select the start directory from the
directory tree
figure.

Option form whole words. Like grep -w.

You can start the search by pressing the OK button.
During the search you can stop from the Stop button and continue from
the Start button.

You can browse the filelist with the up and down arrow keys. The Chdir
button will change to the directory of the currently selected
file. The Again button will ask for the parameters for a new
search. The Quit button quits the search operation. The Panelize
button will place the found files to the current directory panel so
that you can do additional operations on them (view, copy, move,
delete and so on). After panelizing you can press C-r to return to the
normal file listing.

The 'Enable ignore directories' checkbox and input field below it
allow to set up the list of directories that should be skip during the search
files (for example, you may want to avoid searches on a CD-ROM or on a NFS
directory that is mounted across a slow link). List components must be separated
with a colon, here is an example:

/cdrom:/nfs/wuarchive:/afs

Relative paths are supported also. The following example shows how to skip special
directories of version control systems:

/cdrom:/nfs/wuarchive:/afs:.svn:.git:CVS

Attention: input field can contain a dot (.), this means the current absolute path.

You may consider using the
External panelize
command for some operations. Find file command is for simple queries
only, while using External panelize you can do as mysterious searches
as you would like.

External panelize

The External panelize allows you to execute an external program, and
make the output of that program the contents of the current panel.

For example, if you want to manipulate in one of the panels all the
symbolic links in the current directory, you can use external
panelization to run the following command:

find . -type l -print

Upon command completion, the directory contents of the panel will no
longer be the directory listing of the current directory, but all the
files that are symbolic links.

If you want to panelize all of the files that have been downloaded
from your FTP server, you can use this awk command to extract the file
name from the transfer log files:

awk '$9 ~! /incoming/ { print $9 }' < /var/log/xferlog

You may want to save often used panelize commands under a descriptive name,
so that you can recall them quickly. You do this by typing the command on
the input line and pressing Add new button. Then you enter a name under
which you want the command to be saved. Next time, you just choose that
command from the list and do not have to type it again.

Hotlist

The Directory hotlist command shows the labels of the directories
in the directory hotlist. The Midnight Commander will change to the
directory corresponding to the selected label. From the hotlist dialog,
you can remove already created label/directory pairs and add new ones.
To add new directories quickly, you can use the Add to hotlist command
(C-x h), which adds the current directory into the directory hotlist,
asking just for the label for the directory.

This makes cd to often used directories faster. You may consider using the
CDPATH variable as described in
internal cd command
description.

Edit Extension File

This will invoke your editor on the file
~/.config/mc/mc.ext.
The format of this file following:

All lines starting with # or empty lines are thrown away.

Lines starting in the first column should have following format:

keyword/expr,
i.e. everything after the slash until new line is
expr.

keyword
can be:

shell

-
expr
is an extension (no wildcards). File matches it its name ends
with
expr.
Example:
shell/.tar
matches
*.tar.

regex

-
expr
is a regular expression. File matches if its name matches the regular
expression.

directory

-
expr
is a regular expression. File matches if it is a directory and its name
matches the regular expression.

type

-
expr
is a regular expression. File matches if the output of
file %f
without the initial "filename:" part matches regular expression
expr.

default

- matches any file.
expr
is ignored.

include

- denotes a common section.
expr
is the name of the section.

Other lines should start with a space or tab and should be of the format:
keyword=command
(with no spaces around =), where
keyword
should be:
Open
(invoked on Enter or double click),
View
(F3),
Edit
(F4) or
Include
(to add rules from the common section).
command
is any one-line shell command, with the simple
macro substitution.

Rules are matched from top to bottom, thus the order is important. If
the appropriate action is missing, search continues as if this rule
didn't match (i.e. if a file matches the first and second entry and View
action is missing in the first one, then on pressing F3 the View action
from the second entry will be used).
default
should match all the actions.

Background Jobs

This lets you control the state of any background Midnight Commander
process (only copy and move files operations can be done in the
background). You can stop, restart and kill a background job from
here.

Edit Menu File

The user menu is a menu of useful actions that can be customized by
the user. When you access the user menu, the
file .mc.menu from the current directory is used if it exists,
but only if it is owned by user or root and is not world-writable.
If no such file found, ~/.config/mc/menu is tried in the same way,
and otherwise mc uses the default system-wide menu
/usr/share/mc/mc.menu.

The format of the menu file is very simple. Lines that start with
anything but space or tab are considered entries for the menu (in
order to be able to use it like a hot key, the first character should
be a letter). All the lines that start with a space or a tab are the
commands that will be executed when the entry is selected.

When an option is selected all the command lines of the option are
copied to a temporary file in the temporary directory (usually
/usr/tmp) and then that file is executed. This allows the user to put
normal shell constructs in the menus. Also simple macro substitution
takes place before executing the menu code. For more information, see
macro substitution.

Pattern is a normal shell pattern or a regular expression, according
to the shell patterns option. You can override the global value of
the shell patterns option by writing "shell_patterns=x" on the first
line of the menu file (where "x" is either 0 or 1).

For example 'rlf' means either regular file, link or fifo. The 't'
type is a little special because it acts on the panel instead of the
file. The condition '=t t' is true if there are tagged files in the
current panel and false if not.

If the condition starts with '=?' instead of '=' a debug trace will be
shown whenever the value of the condition is calculated.

If the condition begins with '+' (or '+?') instead of '=' (or '=?') it
is an addition condition. If the condition is true the menu entry will
be included in the menu. If the condition is false the menu entry will
not be included in the menu.

You can combine default and addition conditions by starting condition
with '+=' or '=+' (or '+=?' or '=+?' if you want debug trace). If you
want to use two different conditions, one for adding and another for
defaulting, you can precede a menu entry with two condition lines, one
starting with '+' and another starting with '='.

Comments are started with '#'. The additional comment lines must start
with '#', space or tab.

Options Menu

The Midnight Commander has some options that may be toggled on and
off in several dialogs which are accessible from this menu. Options
are enabled if they have an asterisk or "x" in front of them.

The
Configuration
command pops up a dialog from which you can change most of settings of
the Midnight Commander.

The
Layout
command pops up a dialog from which you specify a bunch of options how mc
looks like on the screen.

The
Panel options
command pops up a dialog from which you specify options of file manager panels.

The
Confirmation
command pops up a dialog from which you specify which actions you want to
confirm.

The
Appearance
command pops up a dialog from which you specify the skin.

The
Display bits
command pops up a dialog from which you may select which characters is your
terminal able to display.

The
Learn keys
command pops up a dialog from which you test some keys which are not working
on some terminals and you may fix them.

The
Virtual FS
command pops up a dialog from which you specify some VFS related options.

The
Save setup
command saves the current settings of the Left, Right and Options
menus. A small number of other settings is saved, too.

Configuration

The options in this dialog are divided into several groups: "File
operation options", "Esc key mode", "Pause after run" and "Other options".

File operation options

Verbose operation.
This toggles whether the file Copy, Rename and Delete operations are
verbose (i.e., display a dialog box for each operation). If you have a
slow terminal, you may wish to disable the verbose operation. It is
automatically turned off if the speed of your terminal is less than
9600 bps.

Compute totals.
If this option is enabled, the Midnight Commander computes total byte
sizes and total number of files prior to any Copy, Rename and Delete
operations. This will provide you with a more accurate progress bar
at the expense of some speed. This option has no effect, if
Verbose operation
is disabled.

Classic progressbar.
If this option is enabled, the progressbar of Copy/Move/Delete operations
is always grown form left to right. If disabled, the growing direction
of progressbar follows to direction of Copy/Move/Delete operation:
from left panel to right one and vice versa. Enabled by default.

Mkdir autoname.
When you press F7 to create a new directory, the input line in popup dialog
will be filled by name of current file or directory in active panel.
Disabled by default.

By default the Midnight Commander treats the ESC key as a key prefix.
Therefore, you should press Esc code twice to exit a dialog. But there is
a possibility to use a single press of ESC key for that action.

Single press.
By default this option is disabled. If you'll enable it, the ESC key
will act as a prefix key for set up time interval (see
Timeout
option below), and if no extra keys have arrived, then the ESC key
is interpreted as a cancel key (ESC ESC).

Timeout.
This options is used to setup the time interval (in microseconds)
for single press of ESC key. By default, this inrerval is one second
(1000000 microseconds). Also the timeout can be set via KEYBOARD_KEY_TIMEOUT_US
environment variable (also in microseconds), which has higher priority
than Timeout option value.

Pause after run

After executing your commands, the Midnight Commander can pause, so
that you can examine the output of the command. There are three
possible settings for this variable:

Never.
Means that you do not want to see the output of your command. If you
are using the Linux or FreeBSD console or an xterm, you will be able to
see the output of the command by typing C-o.

On dumb terminals.
You will get the pause message on terminals that are not capable of
showing the output of the last command executed (any terminal that is
not an xterm or the Linux console).

Always.
The program will pause after executing all of your commands.

Other options

Use internal editor.
If this option is enabled, the built-in file editor is used to edit
files. If the option is disabled, the editor specified in the
EDITOR
environment variable is used.
If no editor is specified,
vi
is used. See the section on the
internal file editor.

Use internal viewer.
If this option is enabled, the built-in file viewer is used to view
files. If the option is disabled, the pager specified in the
PAGER
environment variable is used.
If no pager is specified, the
view
command is used. See the section on the
internal file viewer.

Ask new file name.
If this option is enabled, file name is asked before open new file in editor.

Auto menus.
If this option is enabled, the user menu will be invoked at startup.
Useful for building menus for non-unixers.

Drop down menus.
When this option is enabled, the pull down menus will be activated as
soon as you press the F9 key. Otherwise, you will only get the menu title,
and you will have to activate the menu either with the arrow keys or with
the hotkeys. It is recommended if you are using hotkeys.

Shell Patterns.
By default the Select, Unselect and Filter commands will use shell-like
regular expressions. The following conversions are performed to achieve
this: the '*' is replaced by '.*' (zero or more characters); the '?'
is replaced by '.' (exactly one character) and '.' by the literal
dot. If the option is disabled, then the regular expressions are the
ones described in ed(1).

Complete: show all.
By default the Midnight Commander pops up all possible
completions
if the completion is ambiguous only when you press
Alt-Tab
for the second time. For the first time, it just completes as much as
possible and beeps in the case of ambiguity. Enable this option if you
want to see all possible completions even after pressing
Alt-Tab
the first time.

Rotating dash.
If this option is enabled, the
Midnight Commander shows a rotating dash in the upper right corner
as a work in progress indicator.

Cd follows links.
This option, if set, causes the Midnight Commander to follow the
logical chain of directories when changing current directory
either in the panels, or using the cd command. This is the default
behavior of bash. When unset, the Midnight Commander follows the
real directory structure, so cd .. if you've entered that directory
through a link will move you to the current directory's real parent
and not to the directory where the link was present.

Safe delete.
If this option is enabled, deleting files and directory hotlist entries
unintentionally becomes more difficult. The default selection in the
confirmation dialogs for deletion changes from "Yes" to "No".
This option is disabled by default.

Auto save setup.
If this option is enabled, when you exit the Midnight Commander the
configurable options of the Midnight Commander are saved in the
~/.config/mc/ini file.

Layout

The layout dialog gives you a possibility to change the general layout
of screen. The options in this dialog are divided into several groups:
"Panel split", "Console output" and "Other options".

Panel split

The rest of the screen area is used for the two directory panels. You
can specify whether the area is split to the panels in
Vertical
or
Horizontal
direction. Panel layout can be changed using Alt-, (Alt-comma) shortcut.

Equal split.
By default, panels have equal sizes. Using this option you can specify
an unequal split.

Console output

On the Linux or FreeBSD console you can specify how many lines are shown
in the output window. This option is available if Midnight Commander runs
on native console only.

Other options

Menu bar visible.
If enabled, main menu of Midnight Commander is always visible on the top row
of screen above panels. Enabled by default.

Command prompt.
If enabled, command line is avalable. Enabled by default.

Keybar visible.
If enabled, 10 lables associated with F1-F10 keys are located at the bottom
row of screen. Enabled by default.

XTerm window title.
When run in a terminal emulator for X11, Midnight Commander sets the
terminal window title to the current working directory and updates it
when necessary. If your terminal emulator is broken and you see some
incorrect output on startup and directory change, turn off this option.
Enabled by default.

Show free space.
If enabled, free space and total space of current file system is shown
at the bottom frame of panel. Enabled by default.

Panel options

Main panel options

Show mini-status.
If enabled, one line of status information about the currently selected item
is shown at the bottom of the panels. Enabled by default.

Use SI size units.
If this option is enabled, Midnight Commander will use SI units (powers of 1000)
when displaying any byte sizes. The suffixes (k, m ...) are shown in lowercase.
If disabled (default), Midnight Commander will use binary units (powers of 1024)
and the suffixes are shown in upper case (K, M ...)

Mix all files.
If this option is enabled, all files and directories are shown mixed
together. If the option is disabled (default), directories (and links to
directories) are shown at the beginning of the listing, and other files below.

Show backup files.
If enabled, the Midnight Commander will show files ending with a tilde.
Otherwise, they won't be shown (like GNU's ls option -B). Enabled by default.

Show hidden files.
If enabled, the Midnight Commander will show all files that start with
a dot (like ls -a). Disabled by default.

Fast directory reload.
If this option is enabled, the Midnight Commander will use a trick to
determine if the directory contents have changed. The trick is to reload
the directory only if the i-node of the directory has changed; this means
that reloads only happen when files are created or deleted. If what
changes is the i-node for a file in the directory (file size changes,
mode or owner changes, etc) the display is not updated. In these cases,
if you have the option on, you have to rescan the directory manually
(with C-r). Disabled by default.

Mark moves down.
If enabled, the selection bar will move down when you mark a file (with
Insert key). Enabled by default.

Reverse files only.
Allow revert selection of files only. Enabled by default.
If enabled, the reverse selection is applied to files only, not to directories.
The selection of directories is untouched. If off, the reverse selection
is applied to files as well to directories: all unselected items become
selected, and vice versa.

Simple swap.
If both panels contain file listing, simple swap means that panels exchange
its screen positions: left panel become right one, and vice versa. If this
option is unchecked, file listing panels exchange its content keeping listing
format and sort options. Unchecked by default.

Auto save panels setup.
If this option is enabled, when you exit the Midnight Commander the
current settings of panels are saved in the ~/.config/mc/panels.ini file.
Disabled by default.

Navigation

Lynx-like motion.
If this option is enabled, you may use the arrows keys to automatically
chdir if the current selection is a subdirectory and the shell command
line is empty. By default, this setting is off.

Page scrolling.
If set (the default), panel will scroll by half the display when the
cursor reaches the end or the beginning of the panel, otherwise it
will just scroll a file at a time.

Mouse page scrolling.
Controls whenever scrolling with the mouse wheel is done by pages or
line by line on the panels.

File highlight

You can specify whether
permissions
and
file types
should be highlighted with distinctive
Colors.
If the permission highlighting is enabled, the parts of the
perm
and
mode
display fields
which apply to the user running Midnight Commander are highlighted with
the color defined by the
selected
keyword. If the file type highlighting is enabled, file names are colored
according to rules described in
/etc/mc/filehighlight.ini
file. See
Filenames Highlight
for more info.

Quick search

You can specify how the
Quick search
mode should works: case insensitively, case sensitively or be matched
to the the panel sort order: case sensitive or not.

Confirmation

In this dialog you configure the confirmation options for file deletion,
overwriting files, execution by pressing enter, quitting the program,
directory hotlist entries deletion and history cleanup.

Appearance

In this dialog you can select the skin to be used.

See the
Skins
section for technical details about the skin definition files.

Display bits

This is used to configure the range of visible characters on the
screen. This setting may be 7-bits if your terminal/curses supports
only seven output bits, ISO-8859-1 displays all the characters in the
ISO-8859-1 map and full 8 bits is for those terminals that can display
full 8 bit characters.

Learn keys

This dialog allows you to test and redefine functional keys, cursor
arrows and some other keys to make them work properly on your terminal.
They often don't, since many terminal databases are incomplete or broken.

You can move around with the Tab key and with the vi moving keys ('h'
left, 'j' down, 'k' up and 'l' right). Once you press any cursor movement
key and it is recognized, you can use that key as well.

You can test keys just by pressing each of them. When you press a
key and it is recognized properly, OK should appear next to the name
of that key. Once a key is marked OK it starts working as usually,
e.g. F1 pressed the first time will just check that the F1 key works,
but after that it will show help. The same applies to the arrow keys.
The Tab key should be working always.

If some keys do not work properly then you won't see OK appear after
pressing one of these. Then you may want to redefine it. Do it by pressing
the button with the name of that key (either by the mouse or by Enter
or Space after selecting the button with Tab or arrows). Then a message
box will appear asking you to press that key. Do it and wait until the
message box disappears. If you want to abort, just press Escape once
and wait.

When you finish with all the keys, you can Save them. The definitions
for the keys you have redefined will be written into the [terminal:TERM]
section of your ~/.config/mc/ini file (where TERM is the name of your current
terminal). The definitions of the keys that were already working properly
are not saved.

Virtual FS

This option gives you control over the settings of the
Virtual File System.

The Midnight Commander keeps in memory the information related to some
of the virtual file systems to speed up the access to the files in the
file system (for example, directory listings fetched from FTP servers).

Since both the information in memory and the temporary files on disk
take up resources, you may want to tune the parameters of the cached
information to decrease your resource usage or to maximize the speed of
access to frequently used file systems.

Because of the format of the tar archives, the
Tar filesystem
needs to read the whole file just to load the file entries. Since most
tar files are usually kept compressed (plain tar files are species in
extinction), the tar file system has to uncompress the file on the disk
in a temporary location and then access the uncompressed file as a
regular tar file.

Now, since we all love to browse files and tar files all over the disk,
it's common that you will leave a tar file and then re-enter it later.
Since decompression is slow, the Midnight Commander will cache the
information in memory for a limited time. When the timeout expires, all
the resources associated with the file system are released. The default
timeout is set to one minute.

The
FTP File System
(ftpfs) allows you to browse directories on remote FTP servers. It has
several options.

ftp anonymous password
is the password used when you login as "anonymous". Some sites require
a valid e-mail address. On the other hand, you probably don't want to
give your real e-mail address to untrusted sites, especially if you are
not using spam filtering.

ftpfs keeps the directory listing it fetches from a FTP server in a cache.
The cache expire time is configurable with the
ftpfs directory cache timeout
option. A low value for this option may slow down every operation on
the ftpfs because every operation would require sending a request to the
FTP server.

You can define an FTP proxy host for doing FTP. Note that most modern
firewalls are fully transparent at least for passive FTP (see below), so
FTP proxies are considered obsolete.

If
Always use ftp proxy
is not set, you can use the exclamation sign to enable proxy for certain
hosts. See
FTP File System
for examples.

If this option is set, the program will do two things: consult the
/usr/lib/mc/mc.no_proxy file for lines containing host names that
are local (if the host name starts with a dot, it is assumed to be a
domain) and to assume that any hostnames without dots in their names are
directly accessible. All other hosts will be accessed through the
specified FTP proxy.

You can enable using
~/.netrc
file, which keeps login names and passwords for ftp servers. See netrc
(5) for the description of the .netrc format.

Use passive mode
enables using FTP passive mode, when the connection for data transfer is
initiated by the client, not by the server. This option is recommended
and enabled by default. If this option is turned off, the data
connection is initiated by the server. This may not work with some
firewalls.

Save Setup

At startup the Midnight Commander will try to load initialization
information from the ~/.config/mc/ini file. If this file
doesn't exist, it will load the information from the system-wide
configuration file, located in /usr/share/mc/mc.ini. If the
system-wide configuration file doesn't exist, MC uses the default settings.

The
Save Setup
command creates the ~/.config/mc/ini file by saving the
current settings of the
Left, Right
and
Options
menus.

If you activate the
auto save setup
option, MC will always save the current settings when exiting.

There also exist settings which can't be changed from the menus. To
change these settings you have to edit the setup file with your
favorite editor. See the section on
Special Settings
for more information.

Executing operating system commands

You may execute commands by typing them directly in the Midnight
Commander's input line, or by selecting the program you want to
execute with the selection bar in one of the panels and hitting Enter.

If you press Enter over a file that is not executable, the Midnight
Commander checks the extension of the selected file against the
extensions in the
Extensions File.
If a match is found then the code associated with that extension is
executed. A very simple
macro expansion
takes place before executing the command.

The cd internal command

The
cd
command is interpreted by the Midnight Commander, it is not passed to
the command shell for execution. Thus it may not handle all of the
nice macro expansion and substitution that your shell does, although it
does some of them:

Tilde substitution.
The (~) will be substituted with your home directory, if you append a
username after the tilde, then it will be substituted with the login
directory of the specified user.

For example, ~guest is the home directory for the user guest, while
~/guest is the directory guest in your home directory.

Previous directory.
You can jump to the directory you were previously by using the special
directory name '-' like this:
cd -

CDPATH directories.
If the directory specified to the
cd
command is not in the current directory, then The Midnight Commander
uses the value in the environment variable
CDPATH
to search for the directory in any of the named directories.

For example you could set your
CDPATH
variable to ~/src:/usr/src, allowing you to change your directory to
any of the directories inside the ~/src and /usr/src directories, from
any place in the file system by using its relative name (for example
cd linux could take you to /usr/src/linux).

Macro Substitution

When accessing a
user menu,
or executing an
extension dependent command,
or running a command from the command line input, a simple macro
substitution takes place.

Similar to the %t and %T macros, but in addition the files are untagged.
You can use this macro only once per menu file entry or extension file
entry, because next time there will be no tagged files.

%s and %S

The selected files: The tagged files if there are any. Otherwise the
current file.

%cd

This is a special macro that is used to change the current directory
to the directory specified in front of it. This is used primarily as
an interface to the
Virtual File System.

%view

This macro is used to invoke the internal viewer. This macro can be
used alone, or with arguments. If you pass any arguments to this
macro, they should be enclosed in brackets.

The arguments are:
ascii
to force the viewer into ascii mode;
hex
to force the viewer into hex mode;
nroff
to tell the viewer that it should interpret the bold and underline
sequences of nroff;
unformatted
to tell the viewer to not interpret nroff commands for making the text
bold or underlined.

%%

The % character

%{some text}

Prompt for the substitution. An input box is shown and the text inside
the braces is used as a prompt. The macro is substituted by the text
typed by the user. The user can press ESC or F10 to cancel. This macro
doesn't work on the command line yet.

%var{ENV:default}

If environment variable
ENV
is unset, the
default
is substituted. Otherwise, the value of
ENV
is substituted.

The subshell support

The subshell support is a compile time option, that works with the
shells: bash, tcsh and zsh.

When the subshell code is activated the Midnight Commander will
spawn a concurrent copy of your shell (the one defined in the
SHELL
variable and if it is not defined, then the one in the /etc/passwd
file) and run it in a pseudo terminal, instead of invoking a new shell
each time you execute a command, the command will be passed to the
subshell as if you had typed it. This also allows you to change the
environment variables, use shell functions and define aliases that are
valid until you quit the Midnight Commander.

If you are using
bash
you can specify startup
commands for the subshell in your ~/.local/share/mc/bashrc file and
special keyboard maps in the ~/.local/share/mc/inputrc file.
tcsh
users may specify startup commands in the ~/.local/share/mc/tcshrc file.

When the subshell code is used, you can suspend applications at any
time with the sequence C-o and jump back to the Midnight Commander, if
you interrupt an application, you will not be able to run other
external commands until you quit the application you interrupted.

An extra added feature of using the subshell is that the prompt
displayed by the Midnight Commander is the same prompt that you are
currently using in your shell.

The
OPTIONS
section has more information on how you can control the subshell code.

Chmod

The Chmod window is used to change the attribute bits in a group of
files and directories. It can be invoked with the C-x c key combination.

The Chmod window has two parts -
Permissions
and
File.

In the File section are displayed the name of the file or directory
and its permissions in octal form, as well as its owner and group.

In the Permissions section there is a set of check buttons which
correspond to the file attribute bits. As you change the attribute
bits, you can see the octal value change in the File section.

To move between the widgets (buttons and check buttons) use the
arrow keys
or the
Tab
key. To change the state of the check buttons or to select a button
use
Space.
You can also use the hotkeys on the buttons to quickly activate them.
Hotkeys are shown as highlighted letters on the buttons.

To set the attribute bits, use the Enter key.

When working with a group of files or directories, you just click on
the bits you want to set or clear. Once you have selected the bits
you want to change, you select one of the action buttons (Set marked
or Clear marked).

Finally, to set the attributes exactly to those specified, you can use
the
[Set all]
button, which will act on all the tagged files.

[Marked all]
set only marked attributes to all selected files

[Set marked]
set marked bits in attributes of all selected files

[Clean marked]
clear marked bits in attributes of all selected files

[Set]
set the attributes of one file

[Cancel]
cancel the Chmod command

Chown

The Chown command is used to change the owner/group of a file. The hot
key for this command is C-x o.

Advanced Chown

The Advanced Chown command is the
Chmod
and
Chown
command combined into one window. You can change the permissions and
owner/group of files at once.

File Operations

When you copy, move or delete files the Midnight Commander shows the
file operations dialog. It shows the files currently being processed
and uses up to three progress bars. The file bar indicates the
percentage of the current file that has been processed so far. The
count bar shows how many of the tagged files have been handled. The
bytes bar indicates the percentage of the total size of the tagged files
that has been handled. If the verbose option is off, the file and bytes
bars are not shown.

There are two buttons at the bottom of the dialog. Pressing the Skip
button will skip the rest of the current file. Pressing the Abort
button will abort the whole operation, the rest of the files are
skipped.

There are three other dialogs which you can run into during the file
operations.

The error dialog informs about error conditions and has three choices.
Normally you select either the Skip button to skip the file or the Abort
button to abort the operation altogether. You can also select the Retry
button if you fixed the problem from another terminal.

The replace dialog is shown when you attempt to copy or move a file on
the top of an existing file. The dialog shows the dates and sizes of
the both files. Press the Yes button to overwrite the file, the No
button to skip the file, the All button to overwrite all the files, the
None button to never overwrite and the Update button to overwrite if the
source file is newer than the target file. You can abort the whole
operation by pressing the Abort button.

The recursive delete dialog is shown when you try to delete a directory
which is not empty. Press the Yes button to delete the directory
recursively, the No button to skip the directory, the All button to
delete all the directories and the None button to skip all the non-empty
directories. You can abort the whole operation by pressing the Abort
button. If you selected the Yes or All button you will be asked for a
confirmation. Type "yes" only if you are really sure you want to do the
recursive delete.

If you have tagged files and perform an operation on them only the files
on which the operation succeeded are untagged. Failed and skipped files
are left tagged.

Mask Copy/Rename

The copy/move operations let you translate the names of files in an
easy way. To do it, you have to specify the correct source mask and
usually in the trailing part of the destination specify some wildcards.
All the files matching the source mask are copied/renamed according to
the target mask. If there are tagged files, only the tagged files
matching the source mask are renamed.

There are other options which you can set:

Follow links

determines whether make the symlinks and hardlinks in the source
directory (recursively in subdirectories) new links in the target
directory or whether would you like to copy their content.

Dive into subdirs

determines the behavior when the source directory is about to be copied,
but the target directory already exists. The default action is to copy
the contents of the source directory into the target directory.
Enabling this option causes copying the source directory itself into the
target directory.

For example, you want to copy directory
/foo
containing file
bar
to
/bla/foo,
which is an already existing directory. Normally (when
Dive into subdirs
is not set), mc would copy file
/foo/bar
into the file
/bla/foo/bar.
By enabling this option the
/bla/foo/foo
directory will be created, and
/foo/bar
will be copied into
/bla/foo/foo/bar.

Preserve attributes

determines whether to preserve the permissions, timestamps and (if you
are root) the ownership of the original files. If this option is not
set, the current value of the umask will be respected.

Use shell patterns

When this option is on you can use the '*' and '?' wildcards in the source
mask. They work like they do in the shell. In the target mask only the '*'
and '\<digit>' wildcards are allowed. The first '*' wildcard in the target
mask corresponds to the first wildcard group in the source mask,
the second '*' corresponds to the second group and so on. The '\1' wildcard
corresponds to the first wildcard group in the source mask, the '\2' wildcard
corresponds to the second group and so on all the way up to '\9'.
The '\0' wildcard is the whole filename of the source file.

Two examples:

If the source mask is "*.tar.gz", the destination is "/bla/*.tgz" and the
file to be copied is "foo.tar.gz", the copy will be "foo.tgz" in "/bla".

Suppose you want to swap basename and extension so that "file.c" would
become "c.file" and so on. The source mask for this is "*.*" and the
destination is "\2.\1".

Use shell patterns off

When the shell patterns option is off the MC doesn't do automatic
grouping anymore. You must use '\(...\)' expressions in the source
mask to specify meaning for the wildcards in the target mask. This is
more flexible but also requires more typing. Otherwise target masks
are similar to the situation when the shell patterns option is on.

Two examples:

If the source mask is "^\(.*\)\.tar\.gz$", the destination is
"/bla/*.tgz" and the file to be copied is "foo.tar.gz", the copy
will be "/bla/foo.tgz".

Let's suppose you want to swap basename and extension so that "file.c"
will become "c.file" and so on. The source mask for this is
"^\(.*\)\.\(.*\)$" and the destination is "\2.\1".

Case Conversions

You can also change the case of the filenames. If you use '\u'
or '\l' in the target mask, the next character will be converted to
uppercase or lowercase correspondingly.

If you use '\U' or '\L' in the target mask, the next characters will
be converted to uppercase or lowercase correspondingly up to the
next '\E' or next '\U', '\L' or the end of the file name.

The '\u' and '\l' are stronger than '\U' and '\L'.

For example, if the source mask is '*' (
Use shell patterns
on) or '^\(.*\)$' (
Use shell patterns
off) and the target mask is '\L\u*' the file names will be converted
to have initial upper case and otherwise lower case.

You can also use '\' as a quote character. For example, '\\' is
a backslash and '\*' is an asterisk.

Stable symlinks

commands Midnight Commander, that it should change symlinks in the target,
so that they'll point to the same location as it did before. With absolute
symbolic links this does nothing, but if you have a relative one, it will
recompute its value, adding necessary ../ and other directory parts and making
the value as short as possible (most modern filesystems keep short symlinks
inside inodes and thus don't waste much disk space).

Select/Unselect Files

The dialog of group of files and directories selection or uselection.
The
input line
allow enter the regular expression of filenames that will be
selected/unselected.

When
Files only
checkbox is on, only files will be selected. If
Files only
is off, as files as directories will be selected.
When
Shell Patterns
checkbox is on, the regular expression is much like the filename globbing
in the shell (* standing for zero or more characters and ? standing
for one character). If
Shell Patterns
is off, then the tagging of files is done with normal regular
expressions (see ed (1)). When
Case sensitive
checkbox is on, the selection will be case sensitive characters.
If
Case sensitive
is off, the case will be ignored.

Internal Diff Viewer

The mcdiff is a visual diff tool. You can compare two files and edit them
in-place (diffs are updated dynamically). You can browse and view a working
copy from popular version control systems (GIT, Subversion, etc).

Following shortcuts are available in internal diff viewer of Midnight
Commander.

F1
Invoke the built-in hypertext help viewer.

F2
Save modified files.

F4
Edit file of the left panel in the internal editor.

F14
Edit file of the right panel in the internal editor.

F5
Merge the current hunk. Only the current hunk will be merged.

F7
Start search.

F17
Continue search.

F10, Esc, q
Exit from diff viewer.

Alt-s, s
Toggle show of hunk status.

Alt-n, l
Toggle show of line numbers.

f
Maximize left panel.

=
Make panels equal in width.

>
Reduce the size of the right panel.

<
Reduce the size of the left panel.

c
Toggle show of trailing carriage return (CR) symbol as ^M.

2, 3, 4, 8
Set tabulation size

C-u
Swap contents of diff panels.

C-r
Refresh the screen.

C-o
Switch to the subshell and show the command screen.

Enter, Space, n
Find next diff hunk.

Backspace, p
Find previous diff hunk.

g
Go to line.

Down
Scroll one line forward.

Up
Scroll one line backward.

PageUp
Move one page up.

PageDown
Mves one page down.

Home, A1
Moves to the line beginning.

End
Moves to the line end.

C-Home
Move to the file beginning.

C-End, C1
Move to the file end.

Internal File Viewer

The internal file viewer provides two display modes: ASCII and hex.
To toggle between modes, use the F4 key.

The viewer will try to use the best method provided by your system or
the file type to display the information.
Some character sequences, which appear most often in preformatted manual
pages, are displayed bold and underlined, thus making a pretty display
of your files.

When in hex mode, the search function accepts text in quotes and
constant numbers. Text in quotes is matched exactly after removing
the quotes. Each number matches one byte. You can mix quoted text
with constants like this:

"String" -1 0xBB 012 "more text"

Note that 012 is an octal number. -1 is converted to 0xFF.

Here is a listing of the actions associated with each key that the
Midnight Commander handles in the internal file viewer.

F1
Invoke the built-in hypertext help viewer.

F2
Toggle the wrap mode.

F4
Toggle the hex mode.

F5
Goto line. This will prompt you for a line number and will display
that line.

C-r.
Start reverse search if there was no previous search expression else
find next match.

F8
Toggle Raw/Parsed mode: This will show the file as found on disk or if
a processing filter has been specified in the mc.ext file, then the
output from the filter. Current mode is always the other than written
on the button label, since on the button is the mode which you enter
by that key.

F9
Toggle the format/unformat mode: when format mode is on the viewer
will interpret some string sequences to show bold and underline with
different colors. Also, on button label is the other mode than current.

F10, Esc.
Exit the internal file viewer.

next-page, space, C-v.
Scroll one page forward.

prev-page, Alt-v, C-b, Backspace.
Scroll one page backward.

down-key
Scroll one line forward.

up-key
Scroll one line backward.

C-l
Refresh the screen.

C-o
Switch to the subshell and show the command screen.

[n] m
Set the mark n.

[n] r
Jump to the mark n.

C-f
Jump to the next file.

C-b
Jump to the previous file.

Alt-r
Toggle the ruler.

Alt-e
to change charset of displayed text may use M-e (Alt-e).
Recoding is made from selected codepage into system codepage. To
cancel the recoding you may select "<No translation>" in charset
selection dialog.

It's possible to instruct the file viewer how to display a file, look
at the
Edit Extension File section

Internal File Editor

The internal file editor is a full-featured full screen editor. It can
edit files up to 64 megabytes. It is possible to edit binary files.
The internal file editor is invoked using
F4
if the
use_internal_edit
option is set in the initialization file.

The editor is very easy to use and requires no tutoring. To see what
keys do what, just consult the appropriate pull-down menu. Other keys
are: Shift movement keys do text highlighting.
Ctrl-Ins
copies to the file
mcedit.clip
and
Shift-Ins
pastes from mcedit.clip.
Shift-Del
cuts to
mcedit.clip,
and
Ctrl-Del
deletes highlighted text. Mouse highlighting also works, and you
can override the mouse as usual by holding down the shift key
while dragging the mouse to let normal terminal mouse highlighting
work.

To define a macro, press
Ctrl-R
and then type out the key
strokes you want to be executed. Press
Ctrl-R
again when finished. You can then assign the macro to any key you
like by pressing that key. The macro is executed when you press
Ctrl-A
and then the assigned key. The macro is also executed if
you press Meta, Ctrl, or Esc and the assigned key, provided that the
key is not used for any other function. Once defined, the macro
commands go into the file
~/.local/share/mc/mcedit/mcedit.macros
You can delete a macro by deleting the
appropriate line in this file.

To change charset of displayed text may use M-e (Alt-e).
Recoding is made from selected codepage into system codepage. To
cancel the recoding you may select "<No translation>" in charset
selection dialog.

F19
will format the currently highlighted block (plain text or
C
or
C++
code or another). This is controlled by the
file
/usr/share/mc/edit.indent.rc
which is copied to
~/.local/share/mc/mcedit/edit.indent.rc
in your home directory the first time you use it.

The editor also displays non-us characters (160+). When editing
binary files, you should set
display bits
to 7 bits in the options menu to keep the spacing clean.

Options of editor in ini-file

Some editor options of ini-file are described in this section.
Options are placed in [Midnight-Commander] section

editor_wordcompletion_collect_entire_file

Search autocomplete candidates in entire of file or just from
begin of file to cursor position (0)

Screen selector

Midnight Commander supports running many internal modules (such as
editor, viewer and diff viewer) simultaneously and switching between
them without closing open files. Using several file managers at a time,
however, is not currently supported.

Let's call each of these modules a screen. There are three ways to
switch between screens, using one of these global shortcuts:

Alt-}

switch to the next screen;

Alt-{

switch to the previous screen;

Alt-`

open a dialog window with the list of currently open screens (or use the
"Screen list" menu item).

Completion

Let the Midnight Commander type for you.

Attempt to perform completion on the text before current position. MC
attempts completion treating the text as variable (if the text begins
with
$),
username (if the text begins with
~),
hostname (if the text begins with
@)
or command (if you are on the command line in the position where you
might type a command, possible completions then include shell reserved
words and shell built-in commands as well) in turn. If none of these
matches, filename completion is attempted.

Filename, username, variable and hostname completion works on all input
lines, command completion is command line specific. If the completion
is ambiguous (there are more different possibilities), MC beeps and the
following action depends on the setting of the
Complete: show all
option in the
Configuration
dialog. If it is enabled, a list of all possibilities pops up next to
the current position and you can select with the arrow keys and
Enter
the correct entry. You can also type the first letters in which the
possibilities differ to move to a subset of all possibilities and
complete as much as possible. If you press
Alt-Tab
again, only the subset will be shown in the listbox, otherwise the first
item which matches all the previous characters will be highlighted. As
soon as there is no ambiguity, dialog disappears, but you can hide it by
canceling keys
Esc,
F10
and left and right arrow keys. If
Complete: show all
is disabled, the dialog pops up only if you press
Alt-Tab
for the second time, for the first time MC just beeps.

Apply escaping of
?, * and &
symbols (as \?, \*, \& )
in filenames to disallow use them as metasymbols in regular expressions
when substitution is performed in the input line.

Virtual File System

The Midnight Commander is provided with a code layer to access the file
system; this code layer is known as the virtual file system switch. The
virtual file system switch allows the Midnight Commander to manipulate
files not located on the Unix file system.

Currently the Midnight Commander is packaged with some Virtual File
Systems (VFS): the
local
file system, used for accessing the regular Unix file system; the
ftpfs,
used to manipulate files on remote systems with the FTP protocol; the
tarfs,
used to manipulate tar and compressed tar files; the
undelfs,
used to recover deleted files on ext2 file systems (the default file
system for Linux systems),
fish
(for manipulating files over shell connections such as rsh and ssh).
If the code was compiled with
sftpfs
(for manipulating files over SFTP connections).
If the code was compiled with
smbfs
support, you can manipulate files on remote systems with the SMB (CIFS)
protocol.

A generic
extfs
(EXTernal virtual File System) is provided in order to easily expand
VFS capabilities using scripts and external software.

The VFS switch code will interpret all of the path names used and will
forward them to the correct file system, the formats used for each one
of the file systems is described later in their own section.

FTP File System

The FTP File System (ftpfs) allows you to manipulate files on remote
machines. To actually use it, you can use the
FTP link
item in the menu or directly change your current directory using the
cd
command to a path name that looks like this:

The
user,
port
and
remote-dir
elements are optional. If you specify the
user
element, the Midnight Commander will login to the remote machine as that
user, otherwise it will use anonymous login or the login name from the
~/.netrc
file. The optional
pass
element is the password used for the connection. Using the password in
the VFS directory name is not recommended, because it can appear on the
screen in clear text and can be saved to the directory history.

To enable using FTP proxy, prepend
!
(an exclamation sign) to the hostname.

Tar File System

The tar file system provides you with read-only access to your tar
files and compressed tar files by using the chdir command. To change
your directory to a tar file, you change your current directory to the
tar file by using the following syntax:

The mc.ext file already provides a shortcut for tar files, this means
that usually you just point to a tar file and press return to enter
into the tar file, see the
Edit Extension File
section for details on how this is done.

FIle transfer over SHell filesystem

The fish file system is a network based file system that allows you to
manipulate the files in a remote machine as if they were local. To use
this, the other side has to either run fish server, or has to have
bash-compatible shell.

To connect to a remote machine, you just need to chdir
into a special directory which name is in the following
format:

sh://[user@]machine[:options]/[remote-dir]

The
user,options
and
remote-dir
elements are optional. If you specify the
user
element, the Midnight Commander will try to login on the remote
machine as that user, otherwise it will use your login name.

The available
options
are:

'C' - use compression;
'r' - use rsh instead of ssh;
port - specify the port used by remote server.

If the
remote-dir
element is present, your current directory on the remote machine will be
set to this one.

The
user,port
and
remote-dir
elements are optional. If you specify the
user
element, the Midnight Commander will try to login on the remote
machine as that user, otherwise it will use your login name.
port
- specify the port used by remote server (22 by default).
If the
remote-dir
element is present, your current directory on the remote machine will be
set to this one.

Undelete File System

On Linux systems, if you asked configure to use the ext2fs undelete
facilities, you will have the undelete file system available.
Recovery of deleted files is only available on ext2 file systems. The
undelete file system is just an interface to the ext2fs library to
retrieve all of the deleted files names on an ext2fs and provides and
to extract the selected files into a regular partition.

To use this file system, you have to chdir into the special file name
formed by the "undel://" prefix and the file name where the actual
file system resides.

For example, to recover deleted files on the second partition of the
first SCSI disk on Linux, you would use the following path name:

It may take a while for the undelfs to load the required information
before you start browsing files there.

SMB File System

The smbfs allows you to manipulate files on remote machines with SMB
(or CIFS) protocol. These include Windows for Workgroups,
Windows 9x/ME/XP, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Samba.
To actually use it, you may try to use the panel command "SMB link..."
(accessible from the menubar) or you may directly change your current
directory to it using the cd command to a path name that looks like this:

EXTernal File System

extfs
allows you to integrate numerous features and file types into GNU Midnight
Commander in an easy way, by writing scripts.

Extfs filesystems can be divided into two categories:

1. Stand-alone filesystems, which are not associated with any existing
file. They represent certain system-wide data as a directory tree.
You can invoke them by typing
'cd fsname://'
where fsname is an extfs short name (see below). Examples of such
filesystems include audio (list audio tracks on the CD) or apt (list of
all Debian packages in the system).

For example, to list CD-Audio tracks on your CD-ROM drive, type

cd audio://

2. 'Archive' filesystems (like rpm, patchfs and more), which represent
contents of a file as a directory tree. It can consist of 'real' files
compressed in an archive (urar, rpm) or virtual files, like messages
in a mailbox (mailfs) or parts of a patch (patchfs). To access such
filesystems
'fsname://'
should be appended to the archive name. Note that the archive itself
can be on another vfs.

For example, to list contents of a zip archive documents.zip type

cd documents.zip/uzip://

In many aspects, you could treat extfs like any other directory. For
instance, you can add it to the hotlist or change to it from directory
history. An important limitation is that you cannot invoke shell
commands inside extfs, just like any other non-local VFS.

Common extfs scripts included with Midnight Commander are:

a

access 'A:' DOS/Windows diskette
(cd a://).

apt

front end to Debian's APT package management system
(cd apt://).

audio

audio CD ripping and playing
(cd audio://
or
cd device/audio://).

bpp

package of Bad Penguin GNU/Linux distribution
(cd file.bpp/bpp://).

deb

package of Debian GNU/Linux distribution
(cd file.deb/deb://).

dpkg

Debian GNU/Linux installed packages
(cd deb://).

hp48

view and copy files to/from a HP48 calculator
(cd hp48://).

lslR

browsing of lslR listings as found on many FTPs
(cd filename/lslR://).

You could bind file type/extension to specified extfs as described in the
Edit Extension File
section. Here is an example entry for Debian packages:

regex/.deb$
Open=%cd %p/deb://

Colors

The Midnight Commander will try to detect if your terminal supports
color using the terminal database and your terminal name. Sometimes
it gets confused, so you may force color mode or disable color mode
using the -c and -b flag respectively.

If the program is compiled with the Slang screen manager instead of
ncurses, it will also check the variable
COLORTERM,
if it is set, it has the same effect as the -c flag.

You may specify terminals that always force color mode
by adding the
color_terminals
variable to the Colors section of the initialization file. This will
prevent the Midnight Commander from trying to detect if your terminal
supports color. Example:

The program can be compiled with both ncurses and slang, ncurses does
not provide a way to force color mode: ncurses uses just the
information in the terminal database.

The Midnight Commander provides a way to change the default colors.
Currently the colors are configured using the environment variable
MC_COLOR_TABLE
or the Colors section in the initialization file.

In the Colors section, the default color map is loaded from the
base_color
variable. You can specify an alternate color map for a terminal by
using the terminal name as the key in this section. Example:

header
determines the color of panel header, the line that contains column titles
and sort mode indicator.

input
determines the color of input lines used in query dialogs.

gauge
determines the color of the filled part of the progress bar (gauge),
which is used to show the user the progress of file operations, such as
copying.

disabled
determines the color of the widget that cannot be selected.

The dialog boxes use the following colors:
dnormal
is used for the normal text,
dfocus
is the color used for the currently selected component,
dhotnormal
is the color used to differentiate the hotkey color in normal
components, whereas the
dhotfocus
color is used for the highlighted color in the currently selected
component.

Menus use the same scheme but uses the menunormal, menusel, menuhot, menuhotsel
and menuinactive tags instead.

Help uses the following colors:
helpnormal
is used for normal text,
helpitalic
is used for text which is emphasized in italic in the manual page,
helpbold
is used for text which is emphasized in bold in the manual page,
helplink
is used for not selected hyperlinks and
helpslink
is used for selected hyperlink.

Popup menu uses following colors:
pmenunormal
is used for non-selected menu items and as a main color of popup menu window,
pmenusel
is used for selected menu item,
pmenutitle
is used for popup menu title.

The possible colors are: black, gray, red, brightred, green,
brightgreen, brown, yellow, blue, brightblue, magenta, brightmagenta,
cyan, brightcyan, lightgray and white. And there is a special keyword
for transparent background. It is 'default'. The 'default' can only be
used for background color. Another special keyword "base" means mc's main
colors. When 256 colors are available, they can be specified either as
color16 to color255, or as rgb000 to rgb555 and gray0 to gray23. Example:

[Colors]
base_color=normal=white,default:marked=magenta,default

Attributes can be any of bold, underline, reverse and blink, appended by a
plus sign if more than one are desired. The special word "none" means no
attributes, without attempting to fall back to base_color. Example:

menuhotsel=yellow;black;bold+underline

Skins

You can change the appearance of Midnight Commander.
To do this, you must specify a file that contain descriptions of colors
and lines to draw boxes. Redefining of the colors is entirely compatible
with the assignment of colors, as described in Section
Colors.

If your skin contains any of 256-color definitions, you should define
the '256colors' key set to TRUE value in [skin] section.

A skin-file is searched on the following algorithm (to the first one found):

Command line option, environment variable and parameter in config file may
contain the absolute path to the skin-file (with the extension .ini
or without it). Search of skin-file will occur in (to the first one found):

Description of section and parameters

Section
[filehighlight]
contain descriptions of color pairs for filenames highlighting.
Name of parameters must be equal to names of sections into
filehighlight.ini file.
See
Filenames Highlight
for getting more info.

Section
[core]
describes the elements that are used everywhere.

_default_

Default color pair. Used in all other sections if they not contain
color definitions

Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not specified

dfocus

Color of active element (in focus)

dhotnormal

Color of hotkeys

dhotfocus

Color of hotkeys in focused element

Section
[error]
describes the elements that are placed on error dialog windows

_default_

Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not specified

errdhotnormal

Color of hotkeys

errdhotfocus

Color of hotkeys in focused element

Section
[menu]
describes the elements that are placed in menu. This section describes
system menu (called by F9) and user-defined menus (called by F2 in panels
and by F11 in editor).

_default_

Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not specified

entry

Color of menu items

menuhot

Color of menu hotkeys

menusel

Color of active menu item (in focus)

menuhotsel

Color of menu hotkeys in focused menu item

menuinactive

Color of inactive menu

Section
[help]
describes the elements that are placed on help window.

_default_

Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not specified

helpitalic

Color pair for element with
italic
attribute

helpbold

Color pair for element with
bold
attribute

helplink

Color of links

helpslink

Color of active link (on focus)

Section
[editor]
describes the colors of elements placed in editor.

_default_

Default color for this section. Used [core]._default_ if not specified

editbold

Color pair for element with
bold
attribute

editmarked

Color of selected text

editwhitespace

Color of tabs and trailing spaces highlighting

editlinestate

Color for line state area

Section
[viewer]
describes the colors of elements placed in viewer.

viewunderline

Color pair for element with
underline
attribute

Color pair definitions

Any parameter in skin-file contain definition of color pair.

Color pairs described as two colors and the optional attributes
separated by ';'. First field sets the foreground color, second
field sets background color, third field sets the attributes.
Any of the fields may be omitted, in this case value will be
taken from default color pair (global color pair or from default
color pair of this section).

Possible colors (names) and attributes are described in
Colors.
section.

Draw lines

Lines sets in section
[Lines]
into skin-file. By default single lines are used, but you may redefine
to usage of any utf-8 symbols (like to lines, for example).

WARNING!!!
When you build Midnight Commander with the Ncurses screen library
usage of drawing lines is limited!
Possible only drawing a single lines.
For all questions and comments please contact the developers of Ncurses.

Descriptions of parameters
[Lines]:

lefttop

left-top line fragment.

righttop

right-top line fragment.

centertop

down branch of horizontal line

centerbottom

up branch of horizontal line

leftbottom

left-bottom line fragment

rightbottom

right-bottom line fragment

leftmiddle

right branch of vertical line

rightmiddle

left branch of vertical line

centermiddle

cross of lines

horiz

horizontal line

vert

vertical line

thinhoriz

thin horizontal line

thinvert

thin vertical line

Compatibility

Appointment of color by skin-files fully compatible with
the appointment of the colors described in
Colors.
section.

In this case, reassignment of colors has priority over the skin file and is
complementary.

Filenames Highlight

Section [filehighlight] in current skin-file contains key names as
highlight groups and values as color pairs. Color pairs is documented
in
Skins
section.

Rules of filenames highlight are placed in /usr/share/mc/filehighlight.ini file
(~/.config/mc/filehighlight.ini).
Name of section in this file must be equal to parameters names in
[filehighlight] section (in current skin-file).

Keys in these groups are:

type

file type. If present, all other options are ignored.

regexp

regular expression. If present, 'extensions' option is ignored.

extensions

list of extensions of files. Separated by ';' sign.

extensions_case

(make sense only with 'extensions' parameter) make 'extensions'
rule case sentitive (true) or not (false).

Special Settings

Most of the Midnight Commander settings can be changed from the
menus. However, there are a small number of settings which can only be
changed by editing the setup file.

These variables may be set in your ~/.config/mc/ini file:

clear_before_exec

By default the Midnight Commander clears the screen before executing a
command. If you would prefer to see the output of the command at the
bottom of the screen, edit your ~/.config/mc/ini file and change the value of
the field clear_before_exec to 0.

confirm_view_dir

If you press F3 on a directory, normally MC enters that directory. If
this flag is set to 1, then MC will ask for confirmation before changing
the directory if you have files tagged.

ftpfs_retry_seconds

This value is the number of seconds the Midnight Commander will wait
before attempting to reconnect to an FTP server that has denied the
login. If the value is zero, the login will no be retried.

max_dirt_limit

Specifies how many screen updates can be skipped at most in the internal
file viewer. Normally this value is not significant, because the code
automatically adjusts the number of updates to skip according to the
rate of incoming keystrokes. However, on very slow machines or
terminals with a fast keyboard auto repeat, a big value can make screen
updates too jumpy.

It seems that setting max_dirt_limit to 10 causes the best behavior,
and that is the default value.

mouse_move_pages_viewer

Controls if scrolling with the mouse is done by pages or line by line
on the internal file viewer.

only_leading_plus_minus

Allow special treatment for '+', '-', '*' in the command line (select,
unselect, reverse selection) only if the command line is empty. You
don't need to quote those characters in the middle of the command line.
On the other hand, you cannot use them to change selection when the
command line is not empty.

show_output_starts_shell

This variable only works if you are not using the subshell support.
When you use the C-o keystroke to go back to the user screen, if this
one is set, you will get a fresh shell. Otherwise, pressing any key
will bring you back to the Midnight Commander.

timeformat_recent

Change the time format used to display dates less than 6 months from
now.
See strftime or date man page for the format specification. If this
option is absent, default timeformat is used.

timeformat_old

Change the time format used to display dates older than 6 months from
now or for dates in the future.
See strftime or date man page for the format specification. If this
option is absent, default timeformat is used.

torben_fj_mode

If this flag is set, then the home and end keys will work slightly
different on the panels, instead of moving the selection to the first
and last files in the panels, they will act as follows:

The home key will: Go up to the middle line, if below it; else go to the
top line unless it is already on the top line, in this case it will go
to the first file in the panel.

The end key has a similar behavior: Go down to the middle line, if over
it; else go to the bottom line unless you already are at the bottom
line, in such case it will move the selection to the last file name in
the panel.

use_file_to_guess_type

If this variable is on (the default) it will spawn the file command to
match the file types listed on the
mc.ext file.

xtree_mode

If this variable is on (default is off) when you browse the file system
on a Tree panel, it will automatically reload the other panel with the
contents of the selected directory.

fish_directory_timeout

This variable holds the lifetime of a directory cache entry in seconds. The
default value is 900 seconds.

clipboard_store

This variable contains path (with options) to the external clipboard
utility like 'xclip' to read text into X selection from file.
For example:

clipboard_store=xclip -i

clipboard_paste

This variable contains path (with options) to the external clipboard
utility like 'xclip' to print the selection to standard out.
For example:

clipboard_paste=xclip -o

autodetect_codeset

This option allows use the `enca' command to autodetect codeset of text files
in internal viewer and editor. List of valid values can be obtain by the
`enca --list languages | cut -d : -f1' command. Option must be located
in the [Misc] section.

For example:

autodetect_codeset=russian

Parameters for external editor or viewer

The Midnight Commander provides a way for specify an options for external editors
and viewers. The Midnight Commander tries to search the
"[External editor or viewer parameters]" section in the system initialization file
(the mc.lib file located in the Midnight Commander library directory)
and then in the ~/.config/mc/ini file. The option name should be equal to the name
(full pathname) of external editor or viewer. The option value can contain following
variables:

Start line is passed to the external editor/viewer only if it is called from the
Find file
results window.

If external editor/viewer is launched via F4/F3 keys, MC hopes that program
(at least "joe", but probably others too) has an own feature that by default
opens the file where it was last open. MC doesn't prevent external editor/viewer
to save and restore position in opened files.

Terminal databases

The Midnight Commander provides a way to fix your system terminal
database without requiring root privileges. The Midnight Commander
searches in the system initialization file (the mc.lib file located in
the Midnight Commander library directory) and in the
~/.config/mc/ini file for the section
"terminal:your-terminal-name" and then for the section
"terminal:general", each line of the section contains a key symbol that
you want to define, followed by an equal sign and the definition for the
key. You can use the special \e form to represent the escape character
and the ^x to represent the control-x character.

The possible key symbols are:

f0 to f20 Function keys f0-f20
bs backspace
home home key
end end key
up up arrow key
down down arrow key
left left arrow key
right right arrow key
pgdn page down key
pgup page up key
insert the insert character
delete the delete character
complete to do completion

For example, to define the key insert to be the Escape + [ + O + p, you
set this in the ini file:

The
complete
key symbol represents the escape sequences used to invoke the completion
process, this is invoked with Alt-tab, but you can define other keys to do
the same work (on those keyboard with tons of nice and unused keys
everywhere).

FILES

Full paths below may vary between installations. They are also affected
by the
MC_DATADIR
environment variable. If it's set, its value is used instead of
/usr/share/mc in the paths below.

/usr/share/mc/mc.hlp

The help file for the program.

/usr/share/mc/mc.ext

The default system-wide extensions file.

~/.config/mc/mc.ext

User's own extension, view configuration and edit configuration
file. They override the contents of the system wide files if present.

/usr/share/mc/mc.ini

The default system-wide setup for the Midnight Commander, used only if
the user doesn't have his own ~/.config/mc/ini file.

/usr/share/mc/mc.lib

Global settings for the Midnight Commander. Settings in this file
affect all users, whether they have ~/.config/mc/ini or not. Currently, only
terminal settings
are loaded from mc.lib.

~/.config/mc/ini

User's own setup. If this file is present then the setup is loaded
from here instead of the system-wide startup file.

/usr/share/mc/mc.hint

This file contains the hints displayed by the program.

/usr/share/mc/mc.menu

This file contains the default system-wide applications menu.

~/.config/mc/menu

User's own application menu. If this file is present it is used instead
of the system-wide applications menu.

~/.cache/mc/Tree

The directory list for the directory tree and tree view features.

~/.local/share/mc.menu

Local user-defined menu. If this file is present, it is used instead of
the home or system-wide applications menu.

To change default root directory of MC, you can use
MC_HOME
environment variable. The value of MC_HOME must be an absolute path. If MC_HOME
is unset or empty, HOME variable is used. If HOME is unset or empty, MC
directories are get from GLib library.

LICENSE

This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public
License as published by the Free Software Foundation. See the built-in
help for details on the License and the lack of warranty.

BUGS

Provide a detailed description of the bug, the version of the program
you are running
(mc -V
displays this information), the operating system you are running the
program on. If the program crashes, we would appreciate a stack trace.